You are an Account Director at a marketing agency and you've just won your first patient recruitment account. After you finish celebrating, you comb through the budget and a slow dread creeps up on you. No line item for market research and strategy development? Only six months to enroll patients?

Whether or not 2011 is the year of mobile, "mobile" will certainly be the buzzword of the year. As marketers figure out how to put full legal disclaimers into a single pixel and publishers look to mobile-optimize their sites, research on health seekers' current mobile behavior needs to be considered.

With the rise of social media, mobile devices, digital-wireless connectivity, as well as other emerging technologies, our culture is changing more than ever before. And consumers are changing right along with it. Look no further than the emerging trend of the "self-service consumer."

Every patient travels along a pathway to treatment. That path starts at the health and wellness phase of the journey and leads all the way through to treatment, patient adherence and managing an illness. Most pharmaceutical companies have a firm grasp of the patient pathway as it relates to their drugs.

Enabled by the Internet, we have come to expect increasing levels of convenience in everything we do. We can order groceries online and have them delivered the same day. When we're traveling to a new city, there's no need for maps; just geolocate yourself on your iPhone. Looking for the best new LED flat-screen? There are thousands of online reviews and aggregators like CNET awaiting your visit.

Integral to a medical center's success is in its ability to build a relationship with the community/ies it serves. As such, community support is an integral part of the marketing objective. However, along with community-driving efforts, media must first establish awareness in the community. Media objectives must be carefully balanced; alone, neither objective can fully support a medical center. The balance and prioritization has a complex web of factors. This balance must take into account many variables.

What if your company has a product, articles or a community centered on a certain treatment or condition and which condition becomes talked about by a larger audience, in a flash? Are you ready to respond and engage? Are you even equipped to know the condition is a growing conversation topic? Or put another way, if Charlie Sheen contracted a condition you have a treatment for, how would you respond online?